An object model development for UK automated compliance checking

Abstract

Approving building designs against existing UK building regulations manually is a time consuming and tedious process. As the architecture engineering construction (AEC) industry moves from 2D CAD drawings to more semantically rich building information models (BIM), the development of automated compliance checking systems for building regulations becomes achievable. The Industry Foundation Class (IFC) has been accepted worldwide as an inter-operability standard and is a well suited format for automated compliance checking. However, whether the IFC data format can fully support the specialized needs of the UK Building Regulations is still debatable. In order to automate the checking of the building regulations they first need to be interpreted from a human readable free text rule into a set of computer implementable rules. This paper focuses on the analysis of the UK fire safety building regulations for dwellinghouses, to determine and subsequently optimize the potential for automated compliance checking. A UK Building Regulation specific semantically rich object model, appropriate for the requirements of automated compliance checking has been developed.